Finding My Voice in Nineteenth-Century France

Finding My Voice in Nineteenth-Century France

Laura Stanfill

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, my debut novel, is forthcoming from Lanternfish Press in April 2022. I’ll be forty-six. It’s taken a long time to embrace my material and my voice; I probably needed these decades to acknowledge my neurodivergence and to recognize my way of viewing the world as special, not wrong. 

For many years, I wrote the kinds of novels I thought agents and editors wanted. The language sounded like me—playful, ebullient sentences—but the storylines were grim. 

I wanted to be a serious writer. Or, maybe more accurately, to be taken seriously by the industry. After all, I had committed to the literary life in elementary school, writing my first books on manila paper and having my teacher staple them for me. Serious writers work with difficult material, I told myself. 

One of my early literary manuscripts earned me an agent, but no editors bought it, even after I revised in response to editors’ feedback. I gave the next manuscript to my agent during the 2008 recession. She didn’t think it would sell in that dreary economic climate, so she ended our relationship. 

I fell into despair—I had worked on my craft, written a better book than the last one, studied with excellent teachers, and incorporated incisive feedback. Only to hear another no. I didn’t have the heart to query. Worse, I didn’t know what to write about next. 

I might have let go of my publication dream then. When you want something so badly, and have worked for it and failed, there’s an opportunity to put energy elsewhere. To let go. But in considering the options, I recommitted to the work itself. How the process of writing makes me feel. I couldn’t imagine not writing. 

So instead of quitting, I returned to the page. Began again. 

As I cast around for ideas, I found myself considering my parents’ longtime hobby: music boxes. Before radios, mechanical music brought songs into people’s homes. Families either had to play their own tunes or have the money to buy, say, a cylinder box. In addition to traditional music boxes, I grew up with automatons, player pianos, a nickelodeon, juke boxes, and even a street organ. All restored—saved from disrepair and neglect—by my savvy dad. 

My friends’ families went on trips to cities and beaches; my parents and I went to conference hotels for Musical Box Society International meetings. Childhood memories include sitting on scratchy carpet and seeing trousered legs beyond the edges of whatever fantasy novel I happened to be reading. The jovial ta-da of a nickelodeon or the delicate plink of a cylinder box kept me company as I drifted through stories in search of dragons and fairies. 

Now, looking back, I realize I found the inspiration for my debut novel in those conference rooms of my childhood. I was immersed in the musical delights of the past while reading fantasy novels by Piers Anthony and David Eddings. 

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary merges a magical realist approach with historical fiction through a modern thematic lens. Publishers Weekly called it a “charming, lite-fantasy debut.” 

What felt like failure—having my agent dismiss me—opened me up to the possibility of crafting a story beyond the narrow confines I had expected of myself. Without anyone waiting, I could tiptoe into the past, hunt for historical artifacts. I could lean into my whimsical way of seeing the world. 

I could, I decided, play on the page. 

My protagonist, Henri, is the firstborn son in a family of barrel-organ makers. He’s expecting to inherit his father’s workshop. The particular instrument his family manufactures is the serinette, a high-pitched, piccolo-sounding contraption that was used to train songbirds to repeat popular or religious songs. I first learned of this object, also called a bird organ, while combing through a mechanical music glossary. 

Who made these instruments and why? How could anyone spend their life trying to change the way birds sing? What would that be like? 

With the encouragement of my writing friends, I started researching the nineteenth-century French village, Mirecourt, which was known for violins, bobbin lace, and serinettes. Over the next decade, my story took shape. Men in a French workshop, making serinettes. A canary trainer in upstate New York. A firstborn male who doesn’t want to spend his life building instruments to train birds away from their natural voices. I changed Mirecourt to the fictional village of Mireville and added magic. 

There: conflict. There: plot. As my writer friends say, Story this way. 

Singing Lessons developed over a decade-plus, in part because I had to grapple with my expectations of my career and grow into myself. During that time, I had two children and founded a publishing house, Forest Avenue Press. When I connected with my current agent, Laurie Fox of the Linda Chester Literary Agency, she helped me streamline the story. Find what I really wanted to say. And in doing so, I’ve found my material: historical fiction with modern sensibilities and some fantasy woven in. 

Last winter, I finished a full draft of a new novel—one I had begun tinkering with a few years ago. Like Singing Lessons, it’s set in the past and it incorporates a bit of magic and an exploration of musical history. I’m ready for whatever ride that book takes me on—starting with submitting it to my agent after one more revision pass—and I have a twinkling of an idea for the next book. This new concept is bright and shiny and ill-formed, just scribbles and questions and the hint of a narrator, and I can’t wait to see what happens. 

A manuscript, then another. 

It’s all I’ve ever wanted: not to have written, but to write. 

—

Once upon a time, Laura Stanfill lived in a New Jersey house filled with music boxes, street organs, and books. She grew up to become the publisher of Forest Avenue Press. Her work has appeared in Shondaland, The Rumpus, Catapult, The Vincent Brothers Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, and several print anthologies. She believes in indie bookstores and wishes on them like stars from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she resides with her family and Waffles the dog.

Find out more about Laura on her website https://laurastanfill.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/LHStanfill

SINGING LESSONS FOR THE STYLISH CANARY

“A rollicking and tender family story of strong-hearted women, misguided fathers, and rebellious youth that leaps joyfully through generations. . . . I was entranced from the book’s overture right through to the final coda.”

— “Joanna Rose, author of A Small Crowd of Strangers”

“A virtuosic, richly layered saga, Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary is a remarkable achievement. With prose dipping effortlessly into deeply drawn characters, Stanfill strikes the notes of the human condition so deftly that outrage and empathy harmonize in an intoxicating rhapsody. Every turn of this intricate music box produces heartache and wonder.”

— “Eli Brown, author of Cinnamon and Gunpowder”

Georges Blanchard is revered in the small French town of Mireville both as a master serinette maker and for a miraculous incident in his childhood that earned him the title “The Sun-Bringer.” As his firstborn son, Henri Blanchard is expected to follow in his footsteps, but Henri would rather learn to make lace than music boxes.

When Henri discovers a stash of American letters in his father’s drawer, he learns he’s not the firstborn son of Georges Blanchard at all: Henri has an older half-brother born to one of Georges’s American customers. When he crosses the ocean to encounter his half-brother at last, Henri discovers that there’s an entire world beyond Mirevilleace and there may be a perfect place for him yet.

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